Do more and remain happy

EB White, the American writer, once asked James Thurber, his cartoonist friend, about his mother-in-law : "How's she now?" "As compared to what?" Thurber shot back.

Thurber's reply raises all sorts of scenarios: Do you have that old nag, a smiling saint or a tarantula in mind? So, for instance, what should one expect to get when one compares a person who's just won a million-dollar lottery to a wheelchair-bound quadriplegic. In 1978 a trio of psychologists curious about happiness did just that. In their first group were winners of the Illinois state lottery. These men and women had received jackpots of between $50,000 and $1 million. In the second group were victims of devastating accidents. Some had been left paralysed from the waist down. For the others, paralysis started at the neck. A third bunch of Illinois residents randomly selected from the phone book served as their control group.

The subjects were questioned about the state of their happiness past and present and future expectations. It was a no-brainer to find that, in short term, the winners raved about their lottery in highly positive terms while the victims gave their accidents a big thumbs down. But that only made the subsequent results more puzzling: The winners considered themselves no happier at the time of the interviews than the members of the control group did. In the future, the winners expected to become slightly happier, but, once again, no more so than the control-group members. (Even the accident victims expected to be happier than the lottery winners within a few years.) Meanwhile, the winners took significantly less pleasure in daily activities — including clothes buying — than the members of the other two groups.

Does that mean things remain the same the more they change? Or does it simply mean that Time is a big eraser when it comes to vagaries of fortune? Happiness researchers found something more counter-intuitive — that people routinely mispredict how much pleasure or displeasure future events bring. So should you stop buying insurance or lottery tickets? Should one just sit back in the wheelchair wait for the cloud of misery to pass? Derek Bo, a former Harvard University president, considers such questions in his new book, The Politics of Happiness: What Government Can Learn from the NewResearch on Well-being. Do more is the short answer.